"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Friday, February 18, 2011

Obligatory Texas History Lesson

Prompted by TPM, who almost gets the whole story. True, when the Texas Senators (no, not a baseball team) fled in 2003 to thwart DeLay's mid-cycle redistricting plan, one Dem returned to Texas and the law finally went through. But they knew to flee to Oklahoma (basically the closest state from Austin, and still quite a distance) because of the Killer Bees in 1979.

And, as the story at Time notes, that time the tactic worked, even though the Senators holed up in a house in Austin not far from the Capitol. So while I sometimes think the entire country wants to be too much like Texas (a right to work state with almost no union representation, and right-wing politics that would make a Neanderthal think twice), in this case the Senators from Wisconsin clearly learned something from the Senators from Texas. Here's hoping they learned it from the Killer Bees.